84 Quotes by Ben H. Winters

This is how it ends: you just stop.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

They’d been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom.

What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.

No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.” “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.

It’s an attempted murder. It’s a suicide, but you’re attempting to make it seem like a murder.

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance.

Time makes things worse. Bad is faster than good. Wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own. It grows and spreads.

I had spent so much of my life costumed and posing, turning and changing myself, like changing the channels on a television set, that sometimes when I was caught as I was now, in a silent moment, just waiting, nothing to do but sit and wait and think in a white and airless room, I felt like a blank screen. I felt like a dead teleision. I was myself. I was nothing.